2.1.2 Classification by hardware

We distinguish between the following classes of parallelism.

Pipelining :
Segmentation of operations into basic instructions which can be processed consecutively, see vector units in the next section.

Functional units :
Various, functional independent, units for the execution of (different) operations.
e.g.: superscalar units can execute addition, multiplication and load/store at the same time.

Processor arrays :
Arrays of identical processors for the parallel execution of (identical) operations.
z.B.: MasPar computer with 16384 simple processors; systolic arrays in image processing.

Multiprocessing :
A set of independent processors with own instruction set. Parallel execution of whole programs or jobs.

Excluding the pair processor arrays / multiprocessing, all classes can be combined.